How the humanities are useful

Many years ago,I developed a little shtick for my intro classes about the usefulness of the humanities for life. I got a lot of feedback on it from students and eventually wrote it down. I haven't seen its ideas stated fully by anyone in this latest round of skirmishes, so I will publish it below. It's a bit long, but may be useful.

Here goes:

There is a view of the humanities which is quite common in our culture--certainly at every institution where I have ever taught. Common, that is, among the students, but not wholly missing from some of the faculty and administrators. This is the view that what­ever else the humanities are, they are certainly useless. A humanities course may be fun; it may uplift your morals (and who wants sagging morals?). It may enhance your life in vari­ous ways. But it is not “useful.” It will not help you in the real affairs of life.

This judgment presupposes that courses can be divided into the "useful" ones and the "useless" ones, with the humanities grouped among the latter. I think that is not only a fallacy, but a positively dangerous one, and I propose a different classification.

First, to be sure, there are some courses that are indeed useless. I admit that freely. Let's call them “bad courses.”

The ones that are left, I suggest, can best be grouped into those that are “pre­dict­ab­ly useful” and those that are “unpredictably useful.” A predictably useful course is one whose usefulness you can know in advance--like when you are deciding whether or not to take it. A biology course may be “useful,” for example, if you are thinking of go­ing into the health professions; an accounting course, if you want to be a business per­son.

What makes these courses predictably useful is that they communicate expertise: a specific database; and some rules for operating on that data base. That is what you get from courses in fields like biology, accounting, computer science, and so on. And be­cause of this specificity, you know the conditions under which such a course will be use­­ful. It is their specificity which makes them predictable.

You do not get such specific knowledge from humanities courses, and so their use­fulness cannot be predicted. But to conclude that, because you cannot know how and when a humanities course will be useful to you, that therefore it is not useful--that is what I think is downright dangerous.

The problem with expertise is that the data and the rules it is based on can become obsolete, and that this can happen in a second. Examples abound.

• Russian newspapers now publish the economic statistics that 25 years ago re­quired the sophis­ticated techniques of "Kremlinology" to decipher. Those techniques, and the entire profession of Kremlinology, became obsolete the moment Soviet censorship was lifted.

• About twenty years ago, developments in super­con­ductivity rewrote the textbooks of low temperature physics; if you didn't happen to participate in those de­velopments, your Ph.D. in that field became obsolete in a matter of weeks.

• In 1974, there was a major oil crunch, occasioned by problems in the Middle East. Many people became petroleum geologists, specializing in figuring out where to prospect for oil, on the premise that they would always be in demand. Ten years later there was an oil glut, and exploration was canceled. The junkyards of Texas started filling up with oil geologists—and in some cases with their families. The suicide rate soared.

• Two years ago the idea that we might have an African-American President made people roll their eyes in disbelief. Now we’re so used to one we criticize him unmercifully.

• Three years ago markets were known to be self-policing; major financial meltdowns were a thing of the past. Now, that whole view of rationality has gone out the window.

These were all cases of what I call “basic rule changes”—those moments when the facts of one's field change and all one's rules for operating with those facts become outdated, obsolete, and, in a word, useless.

When you are confronted with such a rule change, all your specific knowledge is—useless. So, what do you need?

First, you need to articulate your new situation, both to other people—so you can work with them—and to yourself. And for that you need a refined and subtle vocabulary. The kind of vocabulary that only comes from studying the great writers of a language, and preferably (just to be safe) of several languages. You get that from literary studies.

You need to be able to think clearly and argue intelligently—not just persuasively, but with some confidence that your conclusions are actually valid. You get that from philo­­sophy and allied fields.

You need background knowledge of human beings, how they operate across a wide vari­ety of cultures and times, so that you know how very much alike we all are when cir­cumstances change, as well as how very different we can be. You get this from literature, art, history.

These kinds of knowledge are not the specific skills associated with expertise. They are the very general skills we all have, the ones that go with being—human. The ones imparted by the “humanities.”

A basic rule change, by its very nature, cannot be predicted; if it could, we would have rules for it. So the humanities are not predictably useful. But when a basic rule change comes—and they do come—the humanities are incredibly useful.

They are all that is useful. In October, 1987, the stock market did what all the rules and experts had said was impossible (actually they hadn't "said" it because nobody had ever thought enough about it to rule it out): the Dow Jones average fell by almost 600 points in one day. On that day, people sat at their computers, on Wall Street and else­where, and watched hundred of billions of dollars simply disappear. Not only was there no way to make money off that falling market, as the rules tell you that you can. There was no way even to slow your losses: the standard techniques for limiting exposure simp­ly failed to work. They sat there, frozen to their screens, and watched.

A few weeks later, a professor at the Harvard business school wrote a letter to the New York Times. He said that several of his students had called or written him after the stock fall to say that the course they had taken with him had been the only course they had at the business school that had been useful to them during that catastrophe. It was an English course. Most of them, when they took it, thought it was a joke. They didn't predict, because they couldn't, how useful it would turn out to have been.

Basic rule changes are all around us, though we don't much like to think about it. And ev­er­y time we get into one, the humanities—and only the humanities—are useful to us. Fall­ing in love, for example, is a basic rule change—suddenly your whole life is radically trans­­formed because someone else is at the center of it. And falling in love without Shakespeare's sonnets, in case you haven't tried, is a bit like riding a bike with a broken leg. You can sort of do it, but it just doesn't go very well....

The death of a loved one is another such rule change. When we are confronting something like that, all our professional knowledge, all our expertise… is of no use. All our personal authority and prestige… doesn't matter at all. All the money in the world … doesn't ease the hurt even a tiny bit. But Shakespeare can help: think of what Macbeth says when he is told that his wife has died;

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word. 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time; 

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 

The way to dusty death.

Now that’s useful.

 And when you finally get to the biggest rule change of all...The one we philosophers spend our lives practicing for… Well: there are many stories of captains of industry on their deathbeds, saying that they really should have followed that youthful flair and become a poet or an artist. There is no recorded case of a poet or artist, on their deathbed, saying they wished they had become a captain of industry. No dying person has ever said, "Gee, I wish I'd spent more time at the office.” Nobody has said—“Wow! I read way too much Aristotle and Goethe—I could have made it into another tax bracket!”

The idea that the humanities are useless—would come as a major shock to Socrates, and Plato, and Goethe, and Joyce, and indeed to just about every great hu­man­­ist who ever lived. Don't wait all your life  to find out they were right.